When you enter a hotel room, do you notice how cold it is and do you then wonder about the hotel’s energy conservation practices and do you then link it to their brand promise of being a Corporate Socially Responsible company?

When you have to pay for your in-room Internet access, does it anger you and do you then link it to the brand promise of that hotel that suggests they are business-friendly and they “make you feel like you are at home”?

I know I do and I do not think I am alone. As customers become more demanding and more aware of their rights, I believe there’s a growing legion of travellers who see such services as part of the total guest experience and they link their experience to a brand promise.

Unfortunately, the hospitality industry does not see it that way and even if top management does, it does not filter down into how different units operate within a hotel.

This is the message  the HFTP (Hospitality Financial & Technology Professionals) Asia Pacific chapter wants to hammer home in their forum on April 21 in Singapore – that technology needs to be treated as an extension of the guest experience, rather than a cost item or a knee-jerk reaction to a customer response.

Said Mark Kendall, vice president of HFTP Asia Pacific (above), “The challenge in hospitality is a lot of technology comes under finance and so the strategy is not aligned to business goals but is seen as a business cost.

“Given the way technology is playing such a major role in society today and it has become an extension of the guest experience, technology needs to be more of a business enabler and provide transformational services internally as well as externally.”

This is also the first time technology and finance are being combined in one track by the HFTP in the spirit of “doing more with less”, said Kendall.

According to Kendall, who is also the Practice Lead, Hospitality & Connected Real Estate
Advisory Services, Asia Pacific, for CISCO, hotels have always been considered laggards when it comes to technology adoption compared with other industries.

“One of the focus of the forum is to share what other industries have done that hotels can learn from and how they can produce faster ROI by transforming technology from operation costs to business enablers.”

He said the biggest shift was the move centralized systems to cloud-based services and this would make it possible for hotels to reduce capital expenditure in inhouse systems and instead outsource to achieve “virtualisation” of services.

“The forum will talk about what hotels can learn from other industries in terms of virtualisation of services – how do you make it a reality in today’s market with so many vendors?

“Today, a hotel could have anything from eight to 20 servers, that’s ridiculous. How can you reduce that to 5-8 and still get all the data and services you need?”

Another topic to be discussed is green business. Said Kendall, “We all know that green business is good business – in other verticals, it’s part of their business model but in hospitality, it is still not a topic.”

Kendall said there was a myth that “if you can’t see something, you can’t manage it”.

“That mindset has to change. It also ties back to CSR. Years ago, we didn’t talk about paper wastage. Now we do. How long will it be before a customer starts saying how cold the room is and tie it to the brand

Said Kendall, “Technology is not core to the hotel industry but it has become core to how they achieve customer satisfaction.”

Featured image credit (Hotel reception with bell) : iStock